The legendary Ovaltine Cafe has reopened after a six month closure due to arson. The fire happened on May 23, 2023 and the café reopened on December 15, 2023.
At 80 years, the Ovaltine Café, in the Downtown Eastside is one of the oldest restaurants in the city. It has gained notoriety as one of the 50 best cafes in the world and for its use as a film location in high profile movies and TV series because it still has much of its original ambience, furnishings and decor.
From her bustling and noisy cafe with surrounding noise of sirens and street sounds, Grace Chen, co-owner-operator, describes the circumstances surrounding the fire, and the process to reopen.
The Ovaltine is a community institution. Chen says that after the fire people in the community would approach and ask if anyone had been hurt, if they were okay, and folks wanted to know when the Ovaltine would reopen. This, Chen said, kept people in the community from giving up on this unique café.
In the Downtown Eastside (DTES), Guru Nanak’s Free Kitchen Society is building a kitchen.
The organization has purchased a building at 245 E. Hastings (just east of Main and Hastings) and their temporary Saturday and Sunday kitchens will become permanent and allow them to feed people seven days a week.
Every Saturday and Sunday, volunteers descends on Main and Hastings. They set up a large blue tent that reads “Love All Feed All” and then work to exhume large containers of rice, lentils, rice pudding, juice and chai tea onto several foldout tables. By the time they finish, they will have fed 300 to 400 a hot meal during one of those Vancouver downpours.
Guru Nanak’s also works with food rescue, emergency relief, and providing school supplies for children.
Volunteer Paul Hundle from Guru Nanak’s Free Kitchen sat down with CFRO to talk about their weekly activity: feeding the DTES.
| The Downtown Eastsite (DTES) has a vibrant arts and culture community and two long-time writers from the neighbourhood spoke with CFRO to share more about their art. At one time, poet Gordon Bird was homeless and then became seriously ill with pneumonia. He then found himself in a shelter; as he worked to get back on his feet he applied for a job with Mission Possible (MP), an organization that works to empower people with meaningful employment believing it will transform their lives. Today, Bird, describes just that: after working in the MP Program “Neighbors,” he is now housed and is looking forward to developing a treatment program for others. Then Jim Sands gives CFRO a rundown on storytelling, its history and importance in a changing world. Sands was the most recent artist in residence at the DTES Heart of the City Festival and when he is not writing or making music, he is the resident Santa up at Grouse Mountain. |
The SRO Collaborative organized a solidarity action to support the City of Vancouver on Nov. 7 in their Appeal to maintain vacancy control on SROs (Single Room Occupancy) in Vancouver which restricted landlords from raising the rents on units between tenants.
It is an important step in being able to maintain the inventory of low-income housing in a city where rents are 1st in Canada and 14th in the world, according to advocates.
Ezra Bloom from DTES SRO Collaborative explains to CFRO what is an SRO and why they believe they are essential to battling Vancouver’s current housing crisis.
Following another successful Heart of the City Festival this fall, Terry Hunter and Savannah Walling spoke with CFRO about the history of their involvement in the DTES and how that evolved into DTES’s event.
Their love for this area of the city, its communities and its people has been the impetus for creating this event for the last 20 years.
Frequency / CRFC